Jane Austen
British · 18th–19th century
Novelist of manners, wit, and ironic romantic observation. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility. Known for precisely observed social comedy and romantic intelligence.
Connection to Taylor Swift
A frame for Taylor’s novel-of-manners register and her handling of feeling against reason. Uncle Jerry and Angela apply Sense and Sensibility to marjorie’s balance of sentiment and restraint, to the neoclassical-versus-Romantic tension in the lakes, and to the polite early-nineteenth-century diction community readers hear in How Did It End?. Austen’s Colonel Brandon also joins the list of love-at-first-encounter parallels for Enchanted.
Notable Works
- Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion
Appears in the Archive
Context within the Archive
Sense and Sensibility
“He was a hot house flower to my outdoorsman”
Surfaced via community readers who hear the first verse's diction in Jane Austen's register: hothouse flower, maladies, a touch that was a birthright, the polite early-nineteenth-century idiom of the song's decorous post-mortem. The flower contrast itself arrives through the 1995 film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, in which Emma Thompson's screenplay stages Marianne's suitors through flowers, Colonel Brandon's hothouse bouquet against Willoughby's gathered wildflowers. That scene is the film's invention rather than Austen's, and it maps directly onto the song's hothouse flower and outdoorsman: the sheltered, cultivated suitor against the one who braves the elements.
Sense and Sensibility
Angela & Uncle Jerry include Sense and Sensibility in the love-at-first-sight list. Uncle Jerry notes that Colonel Brandon falls in love with Marianne upon hearing her voice as he walks down a hall, love at first hear rather than first sight.
Sense and Sensibility
Angela & Uncle Jerry cite Sense and Sensibility as an example of the cultural fight between neoclassicism and Romanticism that Taylor's song participates in. Uncle Jerry describes Marianne as the pure Romantic whose emotions spill out everywhere, and Eleanor as the Age of Reason figure who hides her emotions, paralleling Taylor's embrace of emotional expression against her critics.